Terra Firma: Home and Studio as Holistic Art Environment

This paper will focus on ideas around artists’ homes and studios as expressions of tangible biography, beyond their function as the location of art-making practice. Visual artists often use their homes as exploratory laboratories to experiment with a range of artistic disciplines including architectural design, landscape architecture, collecting, curation and assemblage, and interior design; all expanding beyond the established mediums of their oeuvre. The natural locales and built environs in which they choose to live and work and the manners in which they alter or augment these environments consistently provide unique insight into primary aesthetic impulses and the specific requirements needed by any given artist for fostering creative inspiration and production. Spaces such as Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street, Frederic Church’s Olana, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s compound at Abiquiu offer insight into the minds of the artists who created them, that is distinct from other types of scholarly inquiry. Conceptual artist David Ireland’s activated architectural sculpture comprising his Victorian home in San Francisco, shatters previous conceptions relative to demarcations of art/life practice and strict classifications of painting, sculpture, and performance. These spaces claim agency as artworks within themselves, and their experimental nature reveals unique aspects about an artist, their life, and their work. This paper also explores how art environments created by self-taught artists such as James Castle and Clementine Hunter force us to reexamine the traditional definitions of and boundaries around concepts of studio and home; providing links to other non-mainstream artists and their artistic output manifested through physical environment.